


hold your breath and count to ten

by artignatiuscodo



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Anal Sex, Dirty Talk, Heartbreak, M/M, Oral Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:48:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22668067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artignatiuscodo/pseuds/artignatiuscodo
Summary: Q should have gone straight home, gotten some sleep, booked himself an appointment with a very expensive therapist. Instead he bit back a grin and asked, ‘Dinner?’
Relationships: James Bond/Q
Comments: 11
Kudos: 58





	hold your breath and count to ten

**Author's Note:**

> I started this in 2015, after an advance showing of Spectre, but never finished it. It'll be completely Jossed by No Time to Die in a few weeks, but I haven't seen any previews for that yet and wanted to get this out of my head. 
> 
> Tags will be updated as we go.

**_THEN_ **

The youngest SIS quartermaster in history had been the first: Lionel Sheflington became the very first quartermaster for a brand new ‘Section Six’ of military intelligence in 1916, at the age of twenty-two. It was intended to be temporary, a stop-gap until the men off fighting the Great War returned to native land. But one year turned into five, turned into his holding the position with great aplomb for the rest of his life. And quite the life--Sheflington was killed by a sudden brain aneurysm in 1978. He had been at his desk at MI6, working.

The next “Q”, an abbreviation Sheflington had adopted in order to initial inventory forms and supply requests, was a Major Geoffrey Boothroyd, formerly of Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force. He was forty-one years old upon taking up the position in which he stayed for thirty-four years--until his sudden death in the 2012 explosion that flattened the Vauxhall Cross SIS building and claimed the lives of twenty-nine other civil servants. He had been at his desk at MI6, working.

And so the current Q, whose name was still classified (not because it was a job requirement but because it was  _ this _ Q’s requirement), had become only the third SIS quartermaster at the absolutely average age of thirty-one and a half. 

It was this kind of thought--which had struck him suddenly in the middle of about a ream of budget surplus request forms--which had first made him question his continued sanity. He shrugged it off, tucked it away behind his ear where he didn’t have to look at it, and went back to work. 

He probably would have forgotten it all together if further proof of his mental deterioration hadn’t presented itself a few days later.

He was on the roof. 

Q had not been home in over eighty hours, had slept for maybe only about ten of those, and was having trouble remembering the last time he had eaten anything more substantial than half a bag of stale Jelly Babies found in the back of one of his desk drawers. 

It was six months after Silva. The temporary SIS headquarters, underground in Churchill’s more-secret old bunkers, were being retrofitted into less-temporary accommodation, and he had just been informed that the damp, mouldy, rodent-infested concrete hell he’d had to put up with for the past six months was going to become a rather permanent sort of damp, mouldy, rat hell. 

And so he was up on the roof, or what existed of a roof so far, perched on the edge of a particularly delicate-looking piece of scaffolding, down to four cigarettes in a pack that had been new that morning. 

‘Planning on jumping?’ a voice from behind him asked.

It was Bond. He knew this because (A), one didn’t outfit and provide on-mission ops for voices one couldn’t recognise behind one’s back. And also because (B), well--it was Bond. 

Q didn’t turn around. ‘Pull up a chair,’ he said, and waved one hand around in the general area to his left side. Bond settled himself on the scaffolding and took the proffered cigarette. They sat and smoked in silence until Q brushed the final sparks from the last cigarette in the pack off on the metal beam below. ‘No,’ he said.

Bond hummed in question.

‘Not planning on jumping. If my averages hold I have another forty-seven-point-five years,’ (he pronounced the  _ t _ in  _ point _ very sharply here) ‘left as quartermaster, and I have no interest in deliberately making the universe work harder to keep me alive than it must already.’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re on about,’ the 00-agent said.

Q laughed, and it sounded desperate even to his own ears. He finally turned his head to look at his roof-sitting companion. The sun was setting in the background, orange lights reflecting off of Bond’s blondish-grey hair, purple shadows emphasising all of the wrinkles deepened by his scowl, and Q felt something in his heart flip over.

He should have gone straight home, gotten some sleep, booked himself an appointment with a very expensive therapist. Instead he bit back a grin and asked, ‘Dinner?’ That Bond actually did grin, and then agreed, was what convinced Q he had finally completely lost the plot. Not that he’d imagined himself particularly sane before, but everyone has an ego to maintain and lies to tell themselves.

Later, after dinner, with Bond spread open on his sheets--reddened arse propped up on pillows and Q buried balls-deep inside him--Q decided he had never much cared for sanity anyway.

And so it began. The first time might have been a fluke, except that upon Bond’s return from his next mission Q handed him his spare key and sent him off with the stern instruction to shower the blood out his hair before sleeping on Q’s sheets. Bond fell asleep on Q’s couch instead.

That night (early the next morning, really) Q stood under the spray from the shower and let Bond press into him. Gently, so gently, as though Bond were afraid he was going to break. Q spread his legs and tipped his head back to rest on Bond’s shoulder, baring his neck to the taller man. ‘Bond,’ he tried to whisper over the sound of the rushing water. It came out as more of a growl.

Bond responded by sliding his teeth along the side of Q’s neck and brought one hand down from the wall to pinch a nipple. Q rolled his hips to encourage him and a strange, strangled noise slipped out of his throat.

‘Just like that, Q,’ James whispered into his ear, just loud enough to be heard under the spray. ‘Let me hear you. Give it to me.’

And give it to him Q did.

The third time was two weeks later, in a basement toilet at ‘6, with Bond on his knees in front of Q in a stall and Q’s hand gripped tightly in his too-short hair.

‘You’re perfect like this,’ Q said, voice too gravelly to be very quiet, but it was late and they were likely the only personnel still on this level at this hour. ‘On your knees. Looking up at me. Your eyes are watering and they look like the ocean, Bond, you look like the sea.’ Q’s head hit the stall wall as he climaxed, hips twitching forward in the throes of pleasure. 

Bond coughed on the sudden intrusion of come, pulled back to rest on his haunches and wiped his mouth. ‘God, the mouth on you,’ he whispered, and Q was lost, crashing to his own knees and attaching his mouth to the taller man’s neck while almost frantically stroking him off in turn.

‘Come home with me,’ Q pleaded minutes later, as he zipped his fly and attempted to re-tuck his shirt. ‘Please, Bond.’

Bond did.

  
_____

  
  


**_NOW_ **

‘So you’re back, then?’ Q asked the silence.

The silence turned into a soft rustle, turned into the sound of leather soles striking cement, walked up behind him. ‘Apparently.’

Q took a sip from his mug, manually saved the program he was working on, set the mug back down on the desk. ‘Have a nice holiday?’

‘Q.’

‘I’ll admit, eight months is a bit longer than I guessed you would last. Did you get bored, or run out of money first?’

‘I would have had to try much harder in order to run through my life savings in only eight months. I know you’ve been watching my accounts.’

‘Yes, well.’ Q sniffed. ‘Get Dr. Swann killed then, did you?’

Bond came around from behind him, sat in the chair next to the desk. ‘That’s a bit of a low blow. Even from you.’

‘Even from me?’

‘Especially from you.’

Q just looked at him, eyebrows raised.

Bond scowled. ‘Madeline is safely ensconced back in Austria.’

‘I know,’ Q said. ‘Not making quite the pay she was before, but that’s what one gets, I suppose, for leaving a post without notice and then accruing an extraordinarily long blank spot on one’s CV.’ Q adjusted his glasses and turned back to his screens. ‘You’ve been back in London for two weeks.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘You tell me.’

‘You’ve leased a flat. Bought three pairs of nearly identical shoes. Got a haircut; it looks the same as always, by the way, so I hope that was your intention. Bedded two women less than half your age, and a third five years older. And already drunk your way through five bottles of very expensive scotch.’

‘Accurate.’

‘Quite. And now you’re back.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘You tell me.’

‘No, Bond. I can track your location, and I can track your expenditures, I can track your internet history, and I can follow you around London on CCTV. But I have never been able to tell either you or anyone else the  _ reasons _ for the things you do.’

‘J--’

‘No.’ Q interrupted. He shook his head one time, decisively, eyes boring into Bond’s. ‘No,’ he repeated, softer, almost a plea.

‘Fine.’ Bond stood.

‘There’s a new 007,’ Q found himself saying. ‘Younger. Faster.’

‘I know. I’m not going back into the field. You won’t have to make me that exploding pen after all.’

‘I was never going to make you an exploding pen.’

‘I mean, you still could. For old time’s sake.’

Q looked up at the man from above the rims of his glasses. ‘Get out.’

To his credit, Bond left.


End file.
